Very recently, a “global institute” outlined an index which purported to show the “levels of happiness” in multiple countries. The results were comic. The people of India were shown as having a much lower level of “happiness” than even the population of Ukraine, not to mention other countries going through traumatic times such as Pakistan. One individual’s happiness is another’s boredom, or even torment, as for example reading for the purposes of an examination a book on advanced mathematics.
How “happy” is a person through the course of a month, or even a day? Different responses may be expected even at different points of the day, thereby making an accurate assessment of the “level of happiness” a somewhat farcical exercise, especially when the population of the country under review is 1.4 billion, as is the case with India. As for the rankings listed by the “global institute”, stating that Ukrainians are happier than Indians appears to be a somewhat tasteless joke, given that the country has become a shambles after Volodymyr Zelenskyy threw away the plank he secured victory in the polls on, peace, and opted for war as a means of wresting back territory lost to the Russian Federation in 2014, after the Maidan coup that forced an elected Head of State into exile, and got installed a known Russophobe as his substitute.
Each day, a citizen is uncertain whether a bomb will not fall nearby, such that life gets extinguished. Every day, more and more dwellings get converted into rubble, thereby forcing those living in them to forage in the streets. Given such conditions, which are getting more dire by the hour, it is a sign of the aversion to facts of those who created the “happiness index” being referred to that those living in such beleaguered circumstances can be described as happy. And of course, there are indexes prepared by those who believe that the 21st century is, or ought to be, a replica of the 19th, when European powers reigned supreme across the globe. One of them, which claims to have the approval of the UN, no less, presented its view that the people of India were better off under colonial rule than they are at present. It does not need a perusal of the works of Rajni Palme Dutt or Dadabhai Naoroji to know that British rule drained India of its treasure.
Infant mortality was high, as was malnutrition. Life expectancy was low, while illiteracy covered nearly 90% of the population. The impact of colonial rule is visible even in the present in states such as Kerala. To this day, Malabar (which was administered by the British) is less developed in most metrics than Travancore, which had significant autonomy as a Princely State. To justify colonial rule in the guise of a scientific analysis of present conditions verges not simply on the ludicrous but the obscene.
By any standard except those used by pranksters posing as serious researchers, India has moved a considerable distance forward since the Union Jack was replaced by the Tricolour atop Raisina Hill. There are those who ascribe malicious motives to those who present such slanted indices. Quite possible, except that the overall impact of such fabrications is to bring levity, given the comic nature of findings that are transparently manufactured with the motive of ignoring the immense changes that a country that is well on track to having the third largest economy in the world is experiencing.